The Scouts Versus the Ugly Moods of 2013

The Boy Scouts of America got front-page ink, as we say in the newspaper trade, for their currently postponed meditations on the topic of admitting avowed gays to membership.

Word had leaked out that the Scouts were considering a local option solution to the vexed question of their supposed right to determine who can become a member and who can't. At a top-drawer meeting in Irving, Tex., the topic proved too vast and complex for immediate resolution. Consultation and deliberation will take place prior to May meeting of Scouts' national council.

I spoke of the Scouts' "supposed" right to oversee their membership rolls. A decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that right in the Scouts' case, in response to court challenges seeking the overthrow of policies that "discriminate" against gays. That might have settled matters, but for restlessness and motion in the larger society whose present values sometimes cause the Scouts, with their old-fashioned devotion to God and country, to look more and more like outliers.

What courts can't accomplish, social pressures sometimes bring about. The up-tilted eyebrow, the sneer, the lordly putdown in elite journalistic commentary -- such events and occasions collectively have the power to overwhelm.

The oddness of the Scouts' situation has to do with the oddness -- the bizarreness, really -- of efforts to overwhelm an organization whose core principles, you might think, were beyond impeachment.

"On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." So goes the Scout oath -- the pledge that millions of boys have conned and recited. What is wrong with it? A Scout promises to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. There is something the matter here? We'd prefer disloyal, boorish, mean, disobedient, and cowardly and so forth?

It could be so. The war against the Scouts has about it a littleness of spirit, an un-generosity that should be unthinkable. That it no longer seems unthinkable is among our modern blights. That the Boy Scouts of America are bidden by the intellectual-political community to roll over, bark cheerily, and change their practices and thought patterns along lines improvised by the enlightened is further, scarier testimony to the cultural mess we're in.